Saturday, November 29, 2014

Sunday, May 13, 2012

The Grammy Award for Album of the Year is presented by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to "honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales or chart position." Album of the Year is the most prestigious award category at the Grammys having been presented since 1959. Although it was originally presented to the artist alone, the award is now presented to the main artist, the featured artist, the producer, the engineer and/or mixer and the mastering engineer. In 1962, the award name was extended to Album of the Year (other than classical) but, in 1965, the shorter name returned. It was not until 1968, 1969, 1999, and 2011 that the award was won by a rock, country, hip hop, or indie album respectively. As of 2012, classical albums are eligible for this award, with the award for Best Classical Album being discontinued.

Friday, May 11, 2012

For all its frothily primitive charm, Best Coast's 2010 debut Crazy for You isn't exactly ambitious: It's going for, well, frothily primitive charm, captured in deceptively simple sentiments like "When I'm with you, I have fun." Darkness stays mostly confined to the instrumental shading, and in the want-bordering-on-need that seeps into Bethany Cosentino's flat but approachable delivery.

Few bands arrive as fully formed as Beach House, which hasn't strayed far from its musical calling card since its 2006 debut: frosty, dime-store analog keyboards, Alex Scally's swoony slide guitar and the alluring vocals of Victoria Legrand. Where many bands take their fans through wild stylistic shifts or incorporate flashy arrangements, deconstructed beats or bursts of cacophony, Beach House has remained constant in tone, evolving incrementally through precise refinements.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Something happened during the initial theatrical screenings of the Chemical Brothers' concert documentary Don't Think that, while spontaneous, also felt like a foregone conclusion: audiences got up and danced. Sharing a darkened room with a flashy, quick-cutting, psychedelic sensory overload blasted out in Dolby Surround can do that to people. Especially when it's based around a set from arguably the most enduringly successful rave-gone-pop act of all time. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have built a 20-year canon that can effortlessly fill 90 minutes with wave after wave of euphoric, body-shaking classics. And at a time when their occasionally-bumpy transition from next-big-thing 1990s icons to Hanna-scoring cool older brothers has positioned them as elder statesmen of a resurgent moment for electronic dance music, the role of a generation-bridging legacy act has fit them well. So while Gondry and Jonze did them plenty of justice in the MTV era, an actual audiovisual document of their mind-bending live show feels a bit overdue.